It's objectively isn't if it lowers suicide rates relative to pre-transition level. It does not necessarily need to lower rates to population average to be effective
This is not true. Even if your claim about the paper is true (which it isn't), there are other metrics to care about:
- suicidal ideation, which is bad in and of itself
- anxiety, e.g. social anxiety
- depression
Besides, the study does not account for the fact that until 2013, Sweden forced people to have surgery to get updated IDs. If a trans person does not want to have a particular surgery and yet is forced to have it, you can imagine why that would cause a great deal of suffering. That isn't gender-affirming care, that's forced sterilization (which is a human rights violation with a sordid history).
> As evidence for the proposition that “[t]here is no evidence that long-term mental health outcomes are improved or that rates of suicide are reduced by hormonal or surgical intervention,” the AG Opinion cites a 2011 Swedish study by Dhejne et al. that, the AG Opinion claims, “monitored transitioned individuals for 30 years [and] found high rates of post-transition suicide and significantly elevated all-cause mortality, including increased death rates from cardiovascular disease and cancer, although causality could not be established.”49 In fact, the 2011 study by Dhejne is badly out-of-date and does not support the AG Opinion’s claim.
> The Dhejne study compared post-gender-affirmation transgender individuals with cisgender individuals from the general population, as opposed to transgender individuals who did not receive gender-affirming care. Therefore, as the study’s author explicitly cautions in the body of the text, it is impossible to conclude from this data that gender-affirming procedures were a causative factor in suicidality among transgender individuals.50 Rather, the study shows only that transgender adults were more likely to experience suicidal ideation/attempts and risky behavior when compared to the general population in Sweden between 1973 and 2003. Further, the Dhejne study is not generalizable to a modern American population or to adolescents. During the study period, Swedish law required that individuals seeking gender-affirming surgery be sterilized. The presence of this law alone might account for the higher risk of suicide attempts and risky behavior in the transgender population compared to the cisgender population at the time.51